[photon137]

All-in-all, it's a big, big play on Windows 8/RT. A kernel that can perform optimally on ARM/Intel on mobile devices and also support PC devices is a huge achievement - the entire thread-library would have to be one super-cool piece of software engineering. That and elsewhere within the OS, is where the innovation lies, in my opinion.

And now you can see why JavaScript was made a first-class language for the WinRT (not Windows RT) API - content-consumption via touch is now going to be a big feature for Win 8 and nothing serves this better than HTML5/JavaScript.

I'm kinda sad though, in a way, I always considered MS an engineering company - now it's gone the Apple way (which for all its merits is technologically ok-ish if not boring).

[DeepDuh]

DOES it perform well though? And by that I mean things like native hardware video decompression without having too much impact on the battery, real-timeyness of the touch UI and overall low power consumption. These are IMO the underlying technologies where Apple innovated the most with their iOS platform and these metrics are yet to beat by others. Do we already have hands on tests with windows 8 on ARM? I at least haven't seen any.

[photon137]

"native hardware video decompression without having too much impact on the battery" - that's actually where ARM and Intel innovated, not Apple - MS is probably mature enough to deal with processors at least as well as, if not better than, Apple.

As regarding tests, I haven't had access to devices running Windows on ARM - WOA is something of a mystery - they haven't released a full WOA SDK as far as I'm aware - although they do provide a cross-compiler for ARM in the upcoming Visual Studio. So yes, no concrete numbers here.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

IIRC, they aren't letting devs use Win32 on WOA, only WinRT and .NET.

[photon137]

Yes, they're discouraging Win32 use overall (even in the x86/x64 space). But that does not mean you can't build native apps (ie non .NET) for WOA - you can use C/C++ out of the box. You are just bound to use MetroUI and WinRT as your primary APIs - both of which are native subsystems.

Steven Sinofsky: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/09/building-windo...

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Yup, they let you use C++ I think... which is nice since MS have been putting work into C++11 lately.

[flatline3]

> And now you can see why JavaScript was made a first-class language for the WinRT (not Windows RT) API - content-consumption via touch is now going to be a big feature for Win 8 and nothing serves this better than HTML5/JavaScript.

I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. I race for a native app when it comes to content consumption, and native is also required to provide the requisite stream DRM used by Netflix, HBO GO, etc.

Heck, I wish Netflix would hire a better development team and stop trying to do their app in HTML. It's poorly designed and frustrating to use.

[photon137]

That's because usually there is a browser-based layer which runs that HTML/JavaScript.

Here it is Metro UI (via HTML5) powered using JavaScript (running natively on Windows) - equivalent to a C++ native app with a Metro UI.

[flatline3]

I don't really understand why this provides a better environment for producing top-quality media applications over the platforms on the market today.

[photon137]

It doesn't - it provides a perfectly equivalent platform.

In all cases, it will be the codecs registered with the OS that would be used - so the quality of the media cannot be better/worse.

Where this differs is from a developer perspective - you don't have to learn a non-standard UI API (XAML/WinForms/MFC/COM/ATL/Qt/Gtk/Swing/awt/whatever) or a language you're not familiar with (C#/C++/Java - pick any). But you can be sure that the experience will be precisely the same - no API hacks to achieve something specific, nothing at all.

[flatline3]

It's perfectly equivalently poor.

What makes those platform APIs useful are all the tools they provide to simplify the creation of great, well-performing UIs that exceed the user's expectations.

[photon137]

Well, MS provides Visual Studio for this - which isn't a bad toolchain, in my opinion.